1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of content searching and more particularly to results presentation in a query engine.
2. Description of the Related Art
Information systems such as database systems have fulfilled a substantial role in computing from the start. From the most basic data driven application, to complex database management systems, end users have always benefited from the ability to cull a subset of desired data from a large corpus of data based upon one or more search terms. Largely due to the efficiency and speed of database systems, whole industries have experienced dramatic gains in efficiency based upon the ability to retrieve desired record sets from vast collections of data.
The advent of the Internet has further accelerated the adoption of information systems among the consuming public. Prior to the wide-scale adoption of Internet based computing, database systems could be accessed and utilized only by a select group of users and the available content for consumption naturally was limited to that which could be provided by the select group of users. The explosion of the Internet through the deployment of the World Wide Web, however, lifted the intrinsic barrier to content contribution resulting in a literal sea of information.
The World Wide Web has resulted in such a volume of content available for viewing over the Internet, that in the absence of search engine technologies, users would be unable to locate content of interest. Fortunately, the development of search engine technology provides an intuitive mechanism for locating content of interest in response to basic boolean queries. Advanced forms of the search engine provide for natural language searching thereby eliminating the need for users to formulate complex boolean query strings. Nevertheless, depending upon the nature of a particular query, the result set produced by the query can be of little help and the onus of developing an effective query string for content of interest remains with the end user.
All search engines respond to query strings in the same way. The query string is parsed, interpreted and applied against a database of known content to produce a result set. The result set typically is rendered within one or more Web pages, each result in the result set being hyperlinked to corresponding content. Obviously, the broader the query string, the more results that will be presented in the result set. Differentiating one result from the next in the result set, therefore, can be challenging and can defeat the intent of the search. Furthermore, the iterative refinement of the query string to reduce the size of the result set to a manageable few results can be tedious at best. Of course, for each search iteration, the query string must be transmitted to the search engine, processed, and a new result set rendered in the content browser for viewing by the end user.
Notably, the display or information density of descriptive information in a result in a result set can vary by user preference from search engine to search engine. For many commercial search engine embodiments, the density of information can range from a mere hyperlink to corresponding content, to an abstract and photos pertaining to the corresponding content. In all cases, however, once a density level has been selected by an end user, all results in a result set will provide the same level of information density, irrespective of the quality of the query string or the volume of results in a result set. Accordingly, selecting too dense a setting will produce too many Web pages for too many results thereby defeating the ability of the end user to quickly digest the result set. Conversely, too sparse a setting will produce too little information so that a cursory inspection of the results in the result set will not help the end user in refining the search terms in the query string.